Topic: religious intolerance

Easter is an apt moment for the West to ponder the fate of Christians in the Arab and Muslim worlds but, as is usually the case on Christmas, the media tends to focus its attention on anything but the real problem. A typical example was this feature broadcast on CNN about the difficulties being faced by Palestinian Christians. The focus of the piece was how Israeli policies were negatively impacting Christians living in the West Bank.

But though Palestinian Christians, such as the Nablus family shown in the spot, are inconvenienced by security regulations intended to keep terrorists from slaughtering civilians, the discussion not only distorts that issue but also completely ignores the factor that is driving Christians out of the West Bank as well as other parts of the Middle East: Islamist intolerance.

Easter is an apt moment for the West to ponder the fate of Christians in the Arab and Muslim worlds but, as is usually the case on Christmas, the media tends to focus its attention on anything but the real problem. A typical example was this feature broadcast on CNN about the difficulties being faced by Palestinian Christians. The focus of the piece was how Israeli policies were negatively impacting Christians living in the West Bank.

But though Palestinian Christians, such as the Nablus family shown in the spot, are inconvenienced by security regulations intended to keep terrorists from slaughtering civilians, the discussion not only distorts that issue but also completely ignores the factor that is driving Christians out of the West Bank as well as other parts of the Middle East: Islamist intolerance.

In a perfect world, Christians and Muslims from the West Bank would have free access to Jerusalem. Indeed, that was largely the case before the terrorist war launched by the Palestinian Authority in 2000 when not just worshipers but tens of thousands of Arab workers flocked to Israel to earn a living. The chief price of that wholly unnecessary conflict was paid in the blood of over 1,000 Israelis and many more Arabs who died as a result of a conscious decision of the Palestinian Authority to answer Israeli peace offers, including statehood, with violence.

Without the construction of a security fence, many more might still lose their lives. Yet CNN followed the lead of Palestinian propagandists in portraying its function as primarily a means for harassing innocent travelers and, on Easter, Christians who want to walk along the route that is thought to be that of Jesus.

Yet, as the broadcast throws in as a throwaway line, Israel has granted 95 percent of all requests by West Bank Christians to enter Jerusalem. This is consistent with the fact that the only period in its history in which all faiths have had free access to all of the holy sites has been in the years since Jerusalem was reunited under Israeli rule. That’s a fact that is curiously absent from the discussions in the media of Christians in the Middle East.

But as bad as that might be, it is not as great an omission as the complete disinterest on the part of the media in the most serious problem facing Palestinian Christians: the rise of an aggressive Muslim movement that has forced increasing numbers of them to leave the region.

While it is understood, though rarely reported, that Christians are now unwelcome in Hamas-run Gaza, the same is becoming true in areas of the Fatah-ruled West Bank, including the city of Nablus. Christian strongholds like Bethlehem have seen a dramatic population shift.

As is the case throughout the Middle East where an aggressive Islam has targeted all religious minorities—such as the Christian Copts of Egypt who are laboring under the burden of rule by the Muslim Brotherhood—Palestinian Christians are realizing that their future in a Palestine run by Fatah or Hamas is not one in which they will be allowed to flourish.

Yet Palestinian Christians don’t speak much about their woes at the hands of Arab Muslims and instead do their best to be as loud as possible in their complaints about Israel. Doing so gives them some legitimacy within Palestinian society, and foreign reporters who don’t understand what lies behind this dynamic follow along without asking pertinent questions.

There is something vaguely pathetic about the futile efforts of Palestinian Christians to prove their worth to their neighbors by being among the most outspoken enemies of the Jews, but it won’t alter the facts about what is really happening to them. Israel remains a haven of religious freedom while the areas under Palestinian control continue to sink in a morass of Islamist intolerance. But don’t expect CNN or most other media outlets to report that when blaming Israel for Christian problems remains a holiday tradition.